[3] In the initial phase of the Occupation, from 1945 to 1946, SCAP had pursued an ambitious program of social and political reform, designed to ensure that Japan would never again be a threat to world peace.
[3] SCAP also sought to empower previously marginalized groups that it believed would have a moderating effect on future militarism, legalizing the Communist and Socialist parties, encouraging the formation of labor unions, and extending the right to vote to women.
[1] Most famously Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution explicitly disavows war as an instrument of state policy and promises that Japan will never maintain a military.
An early sign of the shift in SCAP's thinking came in January 1947 when MacArthur announced that he would not permit a massive, nationwide general strike that labor unions had scheduled for February 1.
[1] As part of the Reverse Course, thousands of conservative and nationalist wartime leaders were de-purged and allowed to reenter politics and government ministries.
[5] SCAP also attempted to weaken the labor unions they had recently empowered, most notably issuing an edict stripping public-sector workers of their right to go on strike.
[7] This locked Japan into a newly-forged U.S.-Japan Alliance, and ensured that the United States would continue to exercise an outsized influence on Japanese government policies both foreign and domestic.
[7] Historian Nick Kapur has argued that the Reverse Course continued even after 1952 with the covert and overt support of the United States, working in tandem with sympathetic conservative governments in Japan.
[6] Finally in 1955, de-purged conservative politicians, at U.S. urging and with the covert backing of the CIA, united to form the powerful Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan almost continuously since that time.